Specifically, fear of media tycoons who used to boast that some of their newspapers had "won" elections and had left the prime ministerial ambitions of party leaders in ruins.
They could start with a few property tycoons and top bankers being dragged through the Irish courts in handcuffs.
For a different type of director Hopcraft sought out the chairman of Oldham Athletic whom he described as "one of the new breed of postwar tycoons, impatient with established practice, keenly aware of his own acumen, bold in scope".
Many of those who will endure pain over the next 12 months will wonder why they suffer while the banks received billions of taxpayers' euros to rescue them from a crisis they had caused alongside the property tycoons.
On the one hand, the people feel a deep sense of injustice that while they will pay more in indirect taxes and health insurance costs to get the nation's finances back in order, the bankers and the property tycoons appear to be fireproofed from austerity.
The riposte is that Tory tycoons and corporations that don't pay their UK taxes are unreliable witnesses, but even the best rebuttal comes too late.
None of the tycoons who stole billions of dollars of public funds intended to recapitalise banks during the Asian crisis has ever been prosecuted.
That piece of honne, however, may still be too controversial.Honest to AbeFor now, Mr Abe draws much support from the most old-fashioned of Japanese tycoons, as much because of the conservative political beliefs they share as for anything to do with business.
The government wants the RBI to give bank licences to well-connected tycoons; Mr Rajan, sensibly, opposes this and wants more small banks to be created.
Indonesia, the perpetual laggard, has dropped a plan to go soft on corrupt and indebted tycoons and brought in a new, supposedly more scrupulous team to sell the state's industrial assets.
AT FIRST sight, the chances of replacing President Leonid Kuchma and his coterie of tycoons and hard men look increasingly good.
